Gerald Martin, who wrote the acclaimed biography of Gabriel García Márquez (2008), first met Mario Vargas Llosa in 1967 and saw him regularly over the decades to come. He interviewed many of the most important people in the great writer’s life and was given privileged access to his archives in Lima and Princeton. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh, was the President of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature (2000-04), and a leading contributor to the Cambridge History of Latin America. His principal works include a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel Men of Maize (1981), which he also translated and recently re-edited for Penguin Classics (2024), and the influential Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). He lives in Hampshire.

In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, Gerald Martin presents the late Peruvian-born author as a compellingly contradictory figure - at once as the admirable, dashing, brilliant enfant terrible of the Latin American Boom, who went on to become a grand old man of Western letters, and a Nobel laureate — but also as someone reprehensible, a man deeply self-centred and vainglorious, ideologically disingenuous, and a pathological deceiver of those closest to him. A truly fascinating and engrossing read

Gerald Martin, who wrote the acclaimed biography of Gabriel García Márquez (2008), first met Mario Vargas Llosa in 1967 and saw him regularly over the decades to come. He interviewed many of the most important people in the great writer’s life and was given privileged access to his archives in Lima and Princeton. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh, was the President of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature (2000-04), and a leading contributor to the Cambridge History of Latin America. His principal works include a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel Men of Maize (1981), which he also translated and recently re-edited for Penguin Classics (2024), and the influential Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). He lives in Hampshire.

In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, Gerald Martin presents the late Peruvian-born author as a compellingly contradictory figure - at once as the admirable, dashing, brilliant enfant terrible of the Latin American Boom, who went on to become a grand old man of Western letters, and a Nobel laureate — but also as someone reprehensible, a man deeply self-centred and vainglorious, ideologically disingenuous, and a pathological deceiver of those closest to him. A truly fascinating and engrossing read

Gerald Martin, who wrote the acclaimed biography of Gabriel García Márquez (2008), first met Mario Vargas Llosa in 1967 and saw him regularly over the decades to come. He interviewed many of the most important people in the great writer’s life and was given privileged access to his archives in Lima and Princeton. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh, was the President of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature (2000-04), and a leading contributor to the Cambridge History of Latin America. His principal works include a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel Men of Maize (1981), which he also translated and recently re-edited for Penguin Classics (2024), and the influential Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). He lives in Hampshire.

In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, Gerald Martin presents the late Peruvian-born author as a compellingly contradictory figure - at once as the admirable, dashing, brilliant enfant terrible of the Latin American Boom, who went on to become a grand old man of Western letters, and a Nobel laureate — but also as someone reprehensible, a man deeply self-centred and vainglorious, ideologically disingenuous, and a pathological deceiver of those closest to him. A truly fascinating and engrossing read